The Island that Disappeared Read online

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  The English still had little to show for their efforts in the New World in 1629. Thomas Warner had tried to build a settlement at Oyapoc in present-day Guyana; when that failed, he went looking for a place where he and his men might ‘be quiet among themselves’ and founded the first permanent English colony in the Caribbean on St. Kitts in 1622.6 He returned to London, where he secured the backing of City merchant Maurice Thompson. His investment brought quick returns: in 1627, the Hopewell returned from St. Kitts with thirty thousand pounds of tobacco. Encouraged by Warner’s success, the Earl of Carlisle built a colony on Barbados in 1629.

  The English also moved into North America. In 1630, King Charles granted a patent to the Massachusetts Bay Company. But the early settlers of New England had limited aspirations and little in common with the soaring ambitions of the men gathered at Brooke House. John Winthrop, the future governor of Massachusetts, was driven to leave England not by the promise of a new life in a new land, but the threat of impending doom. In 1629, he wrote a letter to his wife, in which he confessed, ‘I am verily persuaded God will bring some heavy affliction upon this land…If the Lord sees it will be good for us, he will provide shelter and a hiding place for us and others.’7 The Puritan grandees in London did not consider the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay colony to be born leaders. John Winthrop came from the lower gentry, as did most of those who followed him on his ‘errand into the wilderness.’ The ‘middling sort’ made good settlers, but they lacked the ambition that marked out the true colonialist.

  In economic terms too, the barren shores of New England looked far less promising than the verdant islands of the Caribbean. Neither Virginia nor Massachusetts could produce cotton or dyewoods, let alone the grapevines and mulberry bushes the new company’s shareholders coveted. The Earl of Warwick was happy to sponsor their narrow, self-serving little settlements on the shores of New England, but there was no way of knowing how long their precarious grip would hold.

  If England was to build a mighty empire, the defenders of ‘the true religion’ would first have to cut off the flow of American gold to the king of Spain’s coffers. Robbery and righteousness, greed and godliness, were bound together in the imperial venture. The early English merchant adventurers saw no contradiction in the forces propelling them toward the Americas. As the Pilgrim Edward Winslow wrote in 1624, ‘In America, religion and profit jump together.’8 In the face of the pacifism and incompetence of their king, and the tepid ambitions of the typical lowborn Puritan, the grandees gathered at Brooke House would throw down the gauntlet to the Spanish. God would protect those who took up His call, and reward those who stayed the course.

  Building a colony on Santa Catalina would be a costly venture, but it was too important to trust to the vagaries of the market. There could be no place for the rapacious, short-term thinking of the typical City of London merchant in the grandees’ scheme. Instead, they would form a private company and limit shares to those twenty men sitting around the table.*2 This meant that each of them would have to invest a much larger sum than they had in any previous colonial venture. The largest contributions were made by the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, and the wealthiest man in the room, twenty-two-year-old Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, a man of ‘all-daring and undaunted spirit.’9

  John Pym was appointed the company’s treasurer. A ‘pudgy little man’ of ‘rough and shaggy appearance,’10 Pym had made a name for himself as a fierce critic of the overweening King Charles, and a champion of Parliament’s rights. He would be assisted by his principal allies in the House of Commons, Oliver St. John, Sir Gilbert Gerard, and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, each of whom had experience of high office in various branches of government.

  A week after their first meeting, the company’s secretary, William Jessop, drafted a petition to the king, requesting permission to colonize Santa Catalina. Securing Charles’s consent would be a delicate process, and one best left to the man who had been invited to become the company’s governor, the Earl of Warwick’s brother, Henry Rich. Rich had no Puritan leanings, was not invited to invest in the company, and attended just one meeting of the board during his eleven-year stint as governor. But none of this mattered, for his role was simply to be the company’s friend at court. In return, he could expect a healthy cut of the vast profits the new colony was expected to make.

  King Charles was not an easy person to get on with. ‘His deportment was very majestic,’ wrote the courtier Sir Philip Warwick, ‘for he would not let fall his dignity, no, not to the greatest foreigners that came to visit him at his court.’ Mild and sweet by temperament, he seemed convinced that his divine right to rule put him beyond the laws of the land. The future archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, called him ‘a mild and gracious prince who knew not how to be, or how to be made, great.’11

  Charles was all too familiar with the Puritan grandees, for they had been making problems for him in Parliament within months of his accession to the throne. Lord Saye and Sele had opposed the king’s attempts to raise new taxes, and John Pym had followed the same line in the House of Commons. Charles had faced strong and united opposition when Parliament met again in March 1628, and when this was followed by a ream of additional demands in June, he suspended Parliament and dismissed the Puritan MPs from his government. He recalled Parliament in the autumn, hoping it would approve his latest money-raising schemes, but securing the assent of such hardheaded opponents was beyond him. In exasperation, he dissolved Parliament in March 1629, and for the next eleven years he governed the country without consulting Parliament.

  Yet the king’s interest was piqued by the petition that Henry Rich brought before him for it informed him of the discovery of an island ideally situated ‘to annoy the King of Spain in the Indies, and convenient to receive a fleet that has a design on any leeward part of the Indies, or Cartagena, Portobello, the Bay of Honduras, Hispaniola, Cuba or Jamaica.’ Although Charles was pursuing a policy of peace with Spain, it looked unlikely to last, and while he didn’t want to invest the little money he had in colony building, he could see the benefit of keeping his most troublesome opponents occupied. On 4 December 1630, he granted a patent for the incorporation of ‘the Company of Adventurers of the City of Westminster for the Plantation of the Islands of Providence or Catalina, Henrietta or Andrea, and the adjacent islands lying upon the coast of America.’*3

  The choice of names was significant. The company’s Puritan grandees had renamed Santa Catalina ‘Providence’ by way of thanks to God, whose watchful guidance had led Daniel Elfrith to the western Caribbean. San Andrés was renamed for Charles’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, in a careful attempt to placate him. It seems to have worked, for Charles went a step further, granting the company the right to settle any island between latitude ten and twenty degrees north ‘not in the actual possession of any other Christian prince.’ He even issued letters of marque, which gave the Earl of Warwick permission to plunder any Spanish ships he might encounter in the Caribbean. In return for his munificence, Charles wanted a fifth of any gold, silver, or precious stones that came into the company’s possession. If Parliament wouldn’t allow him to tax his subjects, he would tax its wealthiest members’ ventures in the New World instead.

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  In considering the constitution by which Providence would be run, the need for discipline and hierarchy was uppermost in the shareholders’ minds. Philip Bell, the governor of the Somers Isles, was appointed governor of the Providence Island Company’s new colony. He would take his instructions from London, although he was expected to consult a six-man island council of prominent soldiers and civilians over the day-to-day running of the colony. Most of the council’s members were in the advance party that gathered on the company’s dock in Deptford in October 1630. Experienced army officers and ships’ captains, many of them were relatives of company shareholders. Daniel Elfrith would return to the island he had discovered as its admiral. Capt. William Rudyerd, younger brother of
MP Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, was appointed commander of the settlers, the first contingent of whom would be dispatched early the following year. His second-in-command was John Pym’s nephew, Lt. William Rous. Since the threat of Spanish attack was never far from the shareholders’ minds, they appointed an English veteran of the Dutch war against the Spanish, Capt. Samuel Axe, to oversee military affairs. Aside from the island council and a detachment of soldiers, the advance party also included a contingent of ‘artificers’—carpenters, sawyers, masons, shipwrights, and coopers—who would build the first settlement on the island.

  Among other things, the colony on Providence was an audacious experiment in how to build a modern community. The objectives of the Providence Island Company were likely inspired by Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, which had become hugely influential among England’s promoters of overseas expansion since its publication in 1627.12 A utopian fragment about a godly, hierarchical, and scientific community set on an island ‘off the coast of America,’ it too begins with a wandering European stumbling upon an unknown island. Among the scientific wonders the narrator finds in New Atlantis are water desalination plants, refrigeration plants, and flying machines. But Bacon’s book looked backward as often as it did forward. New Atlantis was grounded in the belief that the Americas were a lost paradise, the wilderness that God had promised to transform into Eden in the Book of Isaiah. But Bacon also promoted the idea that the wealth and power of the state should be harnessed to advance man’s knowledge of the natural world. While knowledge was the key to improving the material conditions of life, it was being held back by England’s education system, which prized ancient, redundant philosophy over empirical evidence and scientific enquiry.

  From Deptford, Captain Elfrith sailed down the Thames, past the Downs, and into the English Channel. His first port of call was the Somers Isles, where they were joined by Philip Bell and a band of discontented settlers. Bell had been governor of the Isles for the past three years and was relieved to see them sink over the horizon: in a letter home written shortly before leaving, he admitted that he could no longer ‘live in such a slavish subjection to such mean and base minded men as the citizen part of the company are.’13 He was a serious and devout man, and the utopian mission of the new colony appealed.

  The Robert reached Providence on Christmas Eve 1630. Wading ashore from a longboat, Philip Bell led the advance party in a prayer service, in which he thanked God for watching over their voyage and for delivering them from the enemy. In the days that followed, the new governor was delighted to find that Providence surpassed his father-in-law’s ebullient description. The island covered just eight square miles, but its mild climate and fertile soils convinced him that it was the best in the Caribbean. A light, near-constant breeze from the northeast kept temperatures in the low eighties, and while the hills were covered with dense woods, they harbored few insects and no dangerous animals. Nor was there any sign of a native population to contend with. In his first letter to the company in London, Bell wrote, ‘By anyone’s standards, Providence must be accounted utterly beautiful.’14

  The only sticking point was William Blauveldt and the other Dutch buccaneers, who were still living on the little island off the northern tip of Providence. The company was concerned that they might betray the English presence to the Spanish, so Captain Axe was instructed to confine them to the island until he had completed the fortifications the island needed to withstand an attack. Blauveldt and his friends should be ‘so respected that they have no cause of complaint,’ but reminded that they could only ever be ‘occupiers and manuerers’ of the company’s island.15

  Over the days that followed, the members of the island council surveyed the low-lying land that ringed the island for a suitable site for a settlement. They chose a spot where the island’s principal stream opened onto a broad plain between the western shore and the hills. Captain Axe had his men clear the dense scrub, while the carpenters and sawyers cut a track into the hills, and set about felling cedar and ironwood trees. They were accustomed to fashioning planking from cedar, but the ironwood trees were the hardest any of them had ever come across. They could only be felled with axes but made excellent foundation posts.

  By the end of January 1631, they had built a row of simple, well-built huts for themselves. The bricks that had served as ballast in the hull of the Robert were brought ashore to serve as the foundations of the church and the governor’s house. When the masons had laid the last English brick, they dug clay from the flatter ground and fired bricks of their own in a kiln. By the summer, they had built a church and the house for the governor. They called their little settlement ‘New Westminster.’

  Next, they turned their attention to the farm buildings that the first settlers would need. Behind each hut they built a pen for the pigs, chickens, and cattle they had brought out from London. The carpenters built sheds for their crops and the cooper a forge, where he hammered iron into ploughs, hoes, spades, nails, and hooks. The masons built a horse-powered mill to grind the settlers’ harvest of ‘Indian corn’ into flour, and ovens in which to bake cornbread.

  Fields were marked out, and corn, yucca, and potatoes planted. But little rain fell in April, and they watched with growing concern as the hills surrounding their settlement turned the color of straw. Until they brought in the first harvest, the advance party had to live off the hardtack and salted meat they had brought out from London. In the first months of the year, they cleared several acres of land around New Westminster for food crops. Yet the island offered plentiful supplements: the wooded hills abounded with strange fruit, and the coral that grew on the offshore reef attracted shoals of exotic fish. Only in May did the rains come—terrific downpours that lasted for days on end and turned the stream running through New Westminster into a raging torrent.

  When the rain clouds finally passed, the fields were illuminated by dazzling sunlight, and the first seedlings appeared. At night, when the members of the island council gathered in the governor’s house to toast their good fortune, the soldiers, sailors, and artificers gathered around the fire to puff on their clay pipes with the Dutchmen and listen to William Blauveldt’s tales of buccaneering around the Caribbean. When the moon was bright, they watched huge green turtles struggle up the beach to lay their eggs in the warm sand. Blauveldt showed them that these eggs were good to eat, and that by flipping the mother onto her back, they could cut her underbelly open with a cutlass. The meat of the green turtle, cooked over an open fire, became a cherished staple of their diet. In the winter months, the island also abounded with monk seals, which became a great source of fuel as well as food, as once their molten blubber was turned into tallow, it could supply their lamps.16 These hulking creatures were so passive that they could be caught and bludgeoned with barely a struggle. Wasn’t their meek self-sacrifice another sign of the provision God had made for his most daring followers? they asked one another.

  At the end of their first year on the island, Philip Bell prepared a report for the company in London. The colony had met with God’s favor, he assured the shareholders. ‘You would most willingly spend an age in this same Eden,’ he wrote. ‘This, your little spot of land, will grow one of the gardens of the world.’17 Bell felt confident that the island could sustain the first party of settlers, who were due to arrive in the New Year. The day was surely at hand when the merchants of the City of London would import tropical produce from an English colony, instead of feeding the coffers of the country’s enemies.

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  In February 1632, the Providence Island Company’s twenty shareholders met at Brooke House to consider Philip Bell’s report. How stark was the contrast with the first report from the new colony at Massachusetts Bay, which the Earl of Warwick received around the same time. Its governor, John Winthrop, could only lament the death, disease, and general hardship his settlers had had to endure during their first twelve months in New England. Philip Bell’s report carried no such ill omens: there had been no outbreaks of feve
r among the advance party, and few deaths.

  Admittedly, the immediate future was not without problems. Many of the seedlings the advance party had planted on arrival had died during the long drought of the first half of 1631. In the months since, they had harvested three crops of corn; nevertheless Bell asked that they be permitted to grow tobacco until they had a better understanding of the island’s climate and the crops best suited to it. Tobacco was the first profitable crop to be grown in North America. By 1619, it was selling for three shillings per pound in London, and the average annual income of a Virginian tobacco farmer was soon running at seven times that of an English tenant farmer. Stories abounded of Englishmen who had arrived as servants rising into the ranks of Virginia’s planter elite. Suitably encouraged, a generation of young men headed for the Americas to make their fortunes.

  But tobacco had powerful detractors. ‘Surely smoke becomes a kitchen far better than a dining chamber?’ King James asked in his A Counterblast to Tobacco, written in 1604. ‘And yet it makes a kitchen oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soiling and infecting them with an unctuous, oily kind of soot, as has been found in some great tobacco takers, that after their death were opened.’ James hated tobacco with a vengeance. He considered it ‘loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.’18

  Several of the shareholders shared his vehement anti-tabagism. Aside from the physical harm it caused, tobacco farming was an unreliable base on which to build a successful colony. Thanks to their dependence on tobacco, planters in Virginia and the Somers Isles had neglected their food crops and faced starvation within a few years of their arrival. Tobacco might have made fortunes for the first settlers of Virginia, but by 1630, English marketplaces were flooded with the stuff. The Providence Island Company’s shareholders were determined to avoid the shortsighted greed that had stunted the growth of the American colonies. In their reply to Bell’s report, they reminded him that farmers were making just a groat on every pound of tobacco sold, ‘which may justly slack your pace in the pursuit of that commodity.’19